The evolving role of network management in the age of cloud and virtualization

How would you rate your network strategy? Before you answer that question, also consider how you would rate it against your competitors.

Is your current network strategy sufficient to equip you to outperform your competitors?

As business processes continue to become increasingly dependent on a heterogeneous mix of IT infrastructure and applications that extend beyond the boundaries of the enterprise network, your network strategy becomes even more important to success.

Further, as new technologies like virtualization and cloud offer cost savings and increased levels of agility, does your network strategy have the means to deal with these new complexities?

The New Network

The network itself has been reborn with cloud computing and virtualization technologies, as the network plays a pivotal role in the delivery and performance of cloud-based services.

As a result, your network strategy will play a pivotal role in achieving significant costs savings and increased levels of agility, which is why an integrated network management solution is critical to your strategy’s success.

For example: consider how bandwidth will impact cloud services. The number of virtual servers inside the cloud is in a constant state of flux; new servers are being created all the time. Each requires network bandwidth to fulfill its intended function. If that bandwidth is inadequate, virtual server performance will suffer, and so will be the performance of the applications and services it's responsible for.

It’s not just application traffic, but the mobility of virtual machines also requires more network bandwidth as well, putting increased onus on networks.

Comprehensive Network Management Solutions

Traditional legacy network management tools cannot meet the new challenges of cloud and virtualization and demands a much more holistic approach and solutions.

Organizations willing to invest to make that transformative shift to cloud, expecting better business outcomes, need to also reengineer their network strategy.

They must think beyond compute and server virtualization to ensure they have an integrated end-to-end view of their entire infrastructure including networks

Network management must move away from simply monitoring end points ofIT infrastructure to monitor business service availability and performance.

In essence, Network management must transcend to a comprehensive service management solution to achieve the promises of cloud and virtualization.